Congress Guts STOCK Act

Update: Both houses of Congress passed the repeal of the STOCK Act’s broad disclosure provisions, and President Obama signed it on April 15, as we wrote here.

The Senate voted Thursday to kill broad disclosure of already public reports detailing the personal finances of public officials and employees.

The STOCK Act, which was passed by Congress a year ago, requires online posting of the personal financial disclosure statements that lawmakers and congressional candidates, the president and vice president, members of the cabinet and high-ranking congressional and executive branch staff file each year. The data is supposed to be made available in machine readable format that is to be ready to download this October.

The law’s provision barring insider trading by members of Congress was left intact.

With no hearings or notice to the public or to most members of the body, the Senate voted by unanimous consent to remove both the online disclosure requirement for staff members on the Hill and in executive branch agencies and the creation of a public database containing the information within the reports. Roll Call reports that “neither the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee nor its House counterpart seemed to have specifics on what was in the works.”

The changes were handled solely at the leadership level. In response to national security and personal safety concerns but seemingly ignoring transparency considerations, the Senate rolled back much of the progress made by the law’s passage.

Under the Senate’s new version, the reports of lawmakers, the president and vice president, and Senate-confirmed executive branch officials would still be posted online as they are now. But the information within the reports would continue to be locked up in files that are not easily analyzed.

Currently, reports are filed on paper and made available as pdf files. The STOCK Act required all filing to be electronic — no more faxed or mailed paper versions, no more scrawled handwriting to decipher. Under the Senate bill, electronic filing would be available but optional, and the system would be delayed until January 2014.

For seven years, the Center has undertaken the expensive and time-consuming task of keying these reports and making the data available to the public on the web, enabling a number of investigations of the potential conflicts of interest to be found in personal financial holdings.

It’s unclear what the House plans to do, but the deadline for posting senior employees’ reports — already postponed twice — is Monday, April 15. A lawsuit brought by a coalition of groups representing federal employees could also result in a delay even if the House does not act, and the U.S. Office of Government Ethics last week called for an indefinite delay.

Much of the most important progress made by the STOCK Act will be rolled back if the Senate bill is passed by the House and signed by President Obama. Effective and timely ethics disclosures should be considered a priority of a responsive government. Continuing to obscure the contents of these reports by eliminating the database requirements is unnecessary and uncalled for. Throughout the debate over whether tens of thousands of employees should have their personal information released on the web, it has been assumed that any changes should not apply to members of Congress, the president and his cabinet or congressional candidates. The Senate, however, has taken the opportunity to use concerns about other government workers to gut the law of important and noncontroversial provisions that improve disclosure.

As we have frequently argued with regard to Senate campaign finance filings, nonelectronic filings are an unacceptable artifact of the past in 2013. Filing on paper slows the disclosure of information that helps the American public keep tabs on those representing them in government.

The filings of federal employees are and for many years have been available as part of the public record. In this day and age, publicly disclosed should mean available online. Legitimate national security and safety concerns, especially for public employees working in dangerous areas overseas, should be considered — but the danger may be overblown.

But whatever the House decides to do — allow the law to come into full effect, or delay implementation to consider surgical tweaks to protect certain workers — it should not swindle the public by following the Senate’s lead.

Dan is responsible for overseeing the Center's databases tracking lobbying activity and the revolving door. He joined the Center in 2004 and has specialized in monitoring political action committees and the personal finances of government officials. Dan previously worked as a research associate for Common Cause and graduated from the University of Delaware with degrees in political science and history.

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